I first started seriously reading Auden when I was couch surfing, and House-sitting at various musicians homes, Auden was one of the greatest literary discovery of my life. Unlike anything I had read, it was grandiloquent stuff, a poetry that was unabashedly catholic and authoritative. In reading Auden we see love illuminating the world, and in reading Auden in troubled circumstances gives his work a particular resonance. Today, poetry is small, in large because we have been taught that authorial certainty is a form of political incorrectness, the meekness of write-what-you-know is more appropriate for our age where everyone has various opinions yet all say the same thing. Auden would have none of it! The poems I return to, at least, are the ones in which he seems to condense the whole of Western history into a line or two of confident verse: “We fall down in the dance, we make, The old ridiculous mistake.” Somehow that says far more than it ought to. But if he is not terribly political, he is not terribly personal either. Auden was, above all, a poet of culture. Auden shows us how a life embedded in a culture may find in that culture the things that sustain us and point us in the direction of good choices. You can look at Auden’s work, then, as an argument for humanism, a cultural liberalism in which everyone must partake, if we are to avoid gassing and bombing each other into oblivion. His “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” yearns to “teach the free man how to praise.” This seems to have been the aim of every verse he wrote. And if Auden was not political, he was only not overtly so, preferring allegory to, say, the embarrassing propaganda peddled by Pablo Neruda or, worse yet, the regressive romanticism of Ezra Pound. To understand suffering, for example, he heads to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, where he stands before Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, amazed at “how everything turns away, Quite leisurely from the disaster.” That was written in 1938, when much of Europe had turned away from a disaster from its own. A few years back a well known Singer/songwriter/ordained Buddhist Monk/practicing Jew, who also read the Catholic Carmalite Contemplatives, shared this poem by W.H Auden with me. At the time I was having some difficulty in my life and was on the verge of what I now jokingly like to call my nervous-breakthrough. It was exactly what I needed to hear… In fact after hearing it only once, something clicked and I woke up to much of the nonsense I was creating and had created in my life. It was the perfect teaching at the perfect time! I hope you like it… We would rather be ruined than change, We would rather die in our own dread Than climb the cross of the moment, And let our illusions die. I guess we could say that one of the true gifts of a wise teacher is good timing, having the intuition to know when a student is ripe and what teaching will make that apple fall from the tree. In truth, life is the wisest of teachers. If we are truly paying attention then the trees, our children, our enemies, the crazy man talking to himself in the pool-hall, our pets, (I was very happy to see one of his daughters dogs that I loved very much, Nova make the cover of a recent single, maybe Toast will be next?) If we pay close attention to everyone and everything becomes that wise teacher with perfect timing… The reason this is so is because they are mirrors reflecting ourselves back on ourselves and vice versa. If it wasn’t for everyone and everything else, we would be blind, life would be meaningless, we would be dead… So maybe the really radical, insightful thing about Auden is, he is “a healer,” and that this healing is collective. It’s not just what Auden can do for you alone, but for all of us!
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 21:03:37 +0000
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